Topher was in a cheerful mood. It had been a good day: he'd got away with sending Yankee out on an engagement as a Russian astrophysicist endowed with the name Susan Ivanova; beaten his high score on Halo 2 to a bloody pulp during his lunch break and now the mini trampoline which he had ordered out of his ample expense account had just been delivered to his office by a hilariously unamused Laurence Dominic. He was bouncing on it for the very first time when the phone rang. Jumping extra high, he sprang off the trampoline and onto the back of the adjacent couch, caught hold of the top of the railing that bordered the room's upper level and vaulted straight over it to retrieve the handset from his desk.
"Topher Brink, trampolinist extraordinaire, at your service," he panted. "Oh, hey there, Boss Lady. What can I do for you this fine day?"
"You have a visitor, Mr. Brink," said DeWitt curtly. "She is on her way down to you now. Kindly behave yourself in a serious manner conducive to upholding the impeccable reputation of this House."
"A visitor? A she-visitor? For me? But who…?" DeWitt had hung up immediately but Topher interrogated the dial tone all the same. In the nine months since he joined the Dollhouse he had never once had a visitor and this fact didn't surprise or bother him in the least as he hadn't told anyone he was working there. Not even his mom; she thought he was still at Caltech finishing his PhD in computational neuroscience. So did his sister, not that she'd care anyway; she hated him. Did he even know any other women? Like non-fictional, non-programmable ones? Not that he could think of; certainly none who would ever dream of paying him a social call…
Still contemplating this troubling question, Topher replaced the phone and sat down at his desk. He smoothed his hair; picked up a random pile of papers and a pen and tried to look serious and impeccable. This was not an activity at which he excelled and, by the time the elevator doors opened, he had already begun an elaborate doodle of a fleet of Cylon Raiders dive-bombing LA on the back of Yankee's medical chart.
"Hello, Christopher."
Topher looked up, did a cartoonish double-take and then jumped to his feet, sending papers flying. His drawing landed on the floor in front of his visitor who retrieved it, studied it for a moment and then handed it back to him with a smile.
"I'm glad to see that you haven't neglected your artistic calling. I was afraid it was just the tedium of my classes that drove you to imagine this kind of scene of destruction."
Topher blushed and shoved the picture into a file. "No way! I mean, your classes were great. They were my favorite. Really," he babbled. "I didn't know you noticed the doodling or I wouldn't have… But anyway: hi. Hi, Dr Lavenza. How are you? What are you doing here? How did you find me? Why did you find me?"
"Call me Clara, please. I will try to give you answers to all of those questions but it may take a little time. Sit down and I'll explain everything."
"Aw, I can't believe they're making us take fucking psychiatry this semester. Two hours a week of sitting around talking about people's feelings. If I wanted to do that, I'd still be dating Angela!" Zach threw his timetable down on the cafeteria table in disgust.
"Yeah, I know but hey, man, look on the bright side: we've got that new professor from Italy and I've heard she's into using neural modeling for mapping psychiatric disorders and stuff so her class might not be a total bust. Plus," Topher leaned forward conspiratorially over his homemade Frito sandwich, "Alan Chan met her already and he says she's, like, under thirty and hot."
"That means nothing. Al has no standards; he thinks every woman under thirty is hot," replied Zach dismissively, stealing a chip. "Face it, Toph, we've chosen an academic discipline completely devoid of attractive females."
But this time Alan Chan's verdict turned out to be, in Topher's opinion, more than accurate. Dr Clara Lavenza was petite, pale and dark-haired with flashing brown eyes that betrayed a hint of Latin passion kept otherwise perfectly concealed beneath an extremely calm, even subdued exterior. Her wardrobe consisted of a range of knee-length skirts, neatly-pressed shirts and low-heeled shoes; often black, never ostentatious, always tasteful. She spoke relatively little for a teacher, but when she did everything she said was well thought out and to the point, expressed in technically flawless English, though pronounced with an unmistakable - and, to Topher's ears, devastatingly sexy - Italian lilt.
Even if Dr Lavenza hadn't been, physically speaking, pretty much Topher's ideal woman, he'd have kept on coming to her class all the same because actually it was one of the few on his schedule that taught him things he didn't already know or couldn't easily figure out for himself. The depth of her knowledge about neurochemical processes, especially those related to mental illness, was astounding, yet matched by an equally impressive mastery of just about every piece of neural network software in existence, including one she was developing herself.
The only aspect of Dr Lavenza's course that ever evoked complaints amongst any of her students was her tendency, almost every week, to raise moral issues connected with whatever work they were doing and encourage the class to debate them.
"I did enough of this ethics crap in Med School," Zach would grumble under his breath. "Can we just get back to modeling the dorsal striatum already?"
Topher, on the other hand, quite enjoyed the detours into moral philosophy, if only because he liked to play devil's advocate, cheerfully arguing that there was nothing wrong with using psychopharmacological means to normalize autistic people's cognitive function; or that recruitment would be more efficient if employers introduced routine brain imaging; or that the military had a right to consider using psychosurgery to enhance its soldiers' performance. His aim was always the same: to provoke Dr Lavenza enough to shake her out of her habitual state of composure, to make those beautiful eyes blaze and a little color rise to her cheeks. But he was rarely successful. Usually, she would just listen attentively, one eyebrow slightly raised, then, when he'd finished expressing his professed opinions, she'd calmly say, "Well, Christopher," - she always called him Christopher, even though he'd corrected her during roll call in the first class, and somehow, coming from her, it seemed right – "I can see several objections that could be raised against your argument. Before I go through them, would anybody else like to suggest one?"
In fact, there was only ever one occasion on which Topher succeeded in drawing Dr Lavenza into a debate to the extent that she let her personal feelings show. The class had been discussing genetic screening for mental illness and Topher, as usual, was advocating maximum scientific intervention. "C'mon guys, you gotta agree with me on this one," he declared confidently, tipping his chair back onto two legs, "if you test the parents and they're over, say, 40% likely to have a child who will develop depression, isn't it better for everyone if they don't have one at all? Back me up here, Dr L.: society doesn't need the burden of more people with psychiatric disorders if you can easily breed them out, right?" He turned to his teacher with what he considered to be his most charming grin. She was sitting bolt upright with her hands clasped so tightly together that her knuckles were white, shaking her head slowly from side to side as if in disbelief. Topher's smirk faded.
"So you think that people with depression have no right to be alive, do you Christopher?" she asked him, her voice soft and threatening. "Let alone to have children? No doubt, according to you, the world would have been a better place without Isaac Newton, Ludwig van Beethoven, Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Vincent Van Gogh or any of the other countless geniuses who suffered from bipolar disorder. Well, if you think people with mental illnesses shouldn't be allowed to exist, then it's probably not worth trying to work out how to treat them, is it? If we reinstated eugenics we could probably just eliminate them all within a century or two and then there'd be no need for us to waste our time studying psychiatry!"
She stood up, and for a moment Topher thought she was going to throw him out of the room like a badly-behaved fourth-grader, but she just murmured, "Mio dio, it's lucky for the human race that not everyone thinks as you do," turned around and began to draw a genetic diagram on the whiteboard: the debate was over.
After class that day, Justine Nixon, the only female student in the group, caught up with Topher in the corridor. "You're an insensitive dick," she told him. "Didn't you know that Dr Lavenza suffers from depression herself? It runs in her family. She's totally open about the fact that that's why all her own research is into treatments for mental illness. She mentions it all the time in her articles, but then I guess you wouldn't know 'cause you probably think you're too smart ever to bother doing any background reading for class."
"I do the reading, Justine, but I read the parts that are actually about neuroscience," Topher retorted; "unlike you, I'm not more interested in the soap opera stuff about the authors' private lives."
But later he asked Zach if what Justine had said about Dr Lavenza was true.
"That's what people say, yeah. I even heard a rumor that her sister was so depressed she killed herself and that's why Dr L. left Italy and came over to the States; to get away from the traumatic memories or whatever."
Zach caught sight of Topher's stricken face and grinned. "Hey, man, I knew you were into her but you really are, like, a lot, aren't you? You actually care that you pissed her off and you never care when you piss people off. Why don't you make it up to her by offering to buy her a coffee or something? She hasn't been over here that long; she probably doesn't know a whole bunch of people, so, you never know, she might even be desperate enough to date a loser like you."
"Ask her out? Are you freakin' crazy?" Topher shot back automatically. "That's, like… totally against college rules. She's grading my summer research paper! If we were dating and anyone found out about it we'd both get kicked out of the department quicker than you can say conflict of interest."
"Aw, c'mon, Toph. Bullshit! That's the lamest fucking excuse I ever heard. Since when did you give a rat's ass about college rules? You're just chicken, like you always are with girls. Jeez, I don't know why I waste my breath on you, man; it's not my problem you never get laid."
Zach was right, of course: Topher's fear of rejection was deep enough to warrant examination in a whole semester's worth of psychiatry classes. But beneath that there was another, directly opposite and paradoxical reason he would never in a million years dream of asking Clara Lavenza out on a date: he was afraid she would say yes. Gorgeous, intelligent, compassionate Dr Lavenza, who had dedicated her career to searching for ways to help society's most ostracized and vulnerable people, dating Topher Brink, a self-centered grad student with unruly hair who played with neuroscience the same way he played video games? Unthinkable. It would never happen anyway but it would be wrong for him even to try and make it.
After the depression argument, Topher always felt uncomfortable in Dr Lavenza's classes and stopped expressing any kind of opinion, controversial or otherwise; but, even so, when he was headhunted by Rossum three months later and dropped out of his PhD they were one of the only aspects of his old life he regretted having to leave behind. He considered writing her an email saying as much and explaining that he'd been offered a job with such unparalleled opportunities for someone in his field that it would have been ridiculous to turn it down. But there was a clause in his contract banning him from telling anyone but close family members about his new position and, in any case, truth be told, he didn't really like the idea of Dr Lavenza finding out about it: he was sure she'd strongly disapprove. So in the end he just stopped coming to her classes with no warning or explanation. No doubt she'd be glad to see the back of him, he told himself, though that thought was hardly a comforting one.
"It was easy for me to find you, Christopher. I wrote your reference for this job. Didn't you know that?"
"Wha-ha-hat? No, I did not know that!" Topher gaped stupidly at his guest, the hand that was proffering her a juice box frozen in mid-air. "I never even knew they asked for any. I thought the whole recruitment process was uber hush hush."
Clara reached up and took the box. "Thank you. Well, the letter I received was from the Rossum Corporation and they didn't say exactly what the job they were thinking of recruiting you for was, but, as it happened, I'd come across the concept of the Dollhouse already in the course of my research and I'd always speculated that if it did exist it would probably be run by a pharmaceutical giant; they're about the only ones who could afford it. So when Rossum came to Caltech looking to recruit an expert in computational neuroscience for reasons unexplained, I suspected that I'd found my culprit."
"Nice detective work, Doc – I mean, uh, Clara, and thanks for the write-up… So, what kind of thing did you, you know, say about me anyway?" Topher inquired, trying to sound casual. He wasn't sure he really wanted to know the answer but he couldn't stop himself from asking.
"I said you were exceptionally bright with a startlingly original mind and that you seemed to be unhampered by moral qualms. Would you say that I did you justice?" Clara's right eyebrow elevated slightly and she took a dainty sip of her juice.
"Yeah, that seems pretty fair to me." Topher risked a smile and to his delight she smiled back. Clara Lavenza was sitting in his office, drinking his juice and smiling at him! It was completely inexplicable but it definitely sent his day off the scale in awesomeness.
"I guess it must be something to do with your work then, that's brought you here?" he hazarded.
"Yes, that's mainly it, although I must admit there are some personal reasons involved too."
Topher didn't know quite how to respond to this confession - though he couldn't stop his heart giving a confused little leap - and Clara continued without elaborating on it.
"I decided to confront Rossum about managing the Dollhouse and, to my surprise, they didn't try to deny it. However, they did assure me at great length that the enterprise is not run exclusively for financial gain but that it also plays a central part in the 'groundbreaking medical research' which they insist is so important to them. And, much as I distrust companies like Rossum on principle, I had to admit that what they told me did correspond with certain conclusions to which my own work had seemed to point."
"So, don't leave the fans in suspense, Dr L.; tell us: what were those conclusions?" Topher pressed, although he was starting to have an inkling about where all this was leading.
"I'd theorized that the process which Rossum refer to, rather horrifyingly, as 'wiping' could – if carried out repeatedly – be extremely beneficial in correcting the chemical imbalances which underlie many types of mental illness. As you're undoubtedly aware, Rossum claim that this is indeed the case and that several of the so-called Actives who are currently – what do you call it? – employed? here in the Los Angeles Dollhouse are in fact former mental patients undergoing what is essentially a long-running form of treatment for their conditions. The example the spokesman mentioned was an Afghan war veteran with severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder…?"
"Yeah, that's right, we call him Victor. He's one of our most popular Actives, though I have to admit that I've got absolutely no idea if his PTSD's improving or not. That kind of thing's not something I really check for and anyway, as you know, I'm not exactly an expert in mental illness..." Topher flexed his fingers awkwardly for a moment; then he jumped up and came to sit next to Clara on the couch.
"But now I understand why you're here: you want to look at our tech, right?" he whispered urgently, leaning in so close to her ear that her hair tickled his nose. "And the Rossum head honchos would never give an outsider permission, so that's why you've come to me instead. That was a smart move, Doc. Obviously, if DeWitt ever found out that I'd helped you I could kiss goodbye to my startlingly original mind but…" Topher paused for maximum dramatic effect, "I'll do it anyway! I've already figured out a way to feed the CCTV camera in the lab recycled footage so the ass who looks after the security here won't see what we're doing and, obviously, I know you're smart enough to make a few alterations to any part of the tech you copy so it'll look like you came up with it yourself and…"
Topher was talking nineteen-to-the-dozen, practically bursting with jittery enthusiasm and self-importance. He was nervous too, of course, but the forgiveness and gratitude which would doubtless be his reward for helping Dr Lavenza with her work outweighed the risks of the venture by far.
"Thank you, Christopher. It's very kind of you to offer to put your job on the line on my behalf but I really wouldn't ask you to do that." Clara cut Topher's monologue short and sent him careening headlong back into perplexity.
"You wouldn't? I mean, you're not? I mean, what do you mean?"
"I'm sure your 'tech,' as you call it, is fascinating and I would love to examine it one day, but for the time being I'm actually more interested in experimenting with it."
As she spoke, Clara was shuffling discretely backwards on the couch, trying to re-establish the boundaries of personal space which Topher's excitement had caused him to breach. He noticed the movement and drew back too, embarrassed and deflated.
"Experimenting with it?" he repeated uneasily. "Er, so what or who did you want to experiment on exactly? It's just that we have to be kinda careful what we do to our Actives for a bunch of tricksy legal reasons. I mean, I trust you and all but…"
"I want to experiment on myself."
"Yourself? But what…? I don't… How…?" Topher's mouth attempted to form a series of questions but none of them seemed adequate to convey the depth of his bewilderment so he contented himself with a complicated gesture that involved waving both index fingers from his visitor to the imprinting room and back again several times, spinning them around each other and then spreading out his palms towards the ceiling.
"Look, as you may already be aware – if faculty gossip spreads as fast over here as it does in Italy then you certainly will be – I am not only a researcher into mental illness but a sufferer from it too. I have been battling with depression since I was a teenager, sometimes having to take months off work as a result. About two years ago, certain events in my personal life exacerbated my condition and, after a self-imposed period in an institution, I decided to move to the States to try and make a fresh start. Unfortunately, although I felt better for a short while, my demons eventually caught up with me and I sunk lower than I ever had before. You probably haven't heard but I stopped teaching several months ago and had got to the point where I was considering re-institutionalizing myself more permanently. The only thing that prevented me from doing so was a lingering reluctance to abandon my work, though I haven't made any significant progress with it since I arrived in this country. Then, a few weeks ago, it suddenly hit me that there was one direction in which I could take my research, which would, if my conjecture proved accurate, simultaneously function as a treatment for my own illness."
Topher had been sitting motionless, staring intently at Clara as she spoke, but as soon as he saw where her explanation was leading he began to chant quietly under his breath: "No, no, no, no."
"No?" She broke off and looked at him curiously.
"I know what you're thinking and you mustn't; you mustn't even think about it! You don't belong in this place. It may look like a luxury spa filled with sexy, smiley people but underneath there's badness at the core - in the essence of what we do – and you shouldn't be a part of it; you're just too… too… too good to be here," Topher finished lamely. Why was it that he could always argue so calmly and persuasively in support of any point he chose, just as long as he didn't really care about or even believe in it, but as soon as he was faced with the task of convincing someone of something about which he felt passionately he was reduced to a childish, stammering mess?
"You work here."
"Exactly! That's exactly my point. I work here because I'm – what was it? – 'unhampered by moral qualms' and, therefore, I love it; I love my job. But you're not like me; we both know that. You have a conscience and principles and all that pesky kind of stuff. If you became an Active, think about how you'd feel the day when your contract expired, when you woke up and started to wonder about all the ugly, mean and violent things you might have done during the five years you were out. I don't think you could ever really go back to being the same person you were before, and I don't mean that in a good way."
What Topher didn't add was that he knew very well how he'd feel programming the woman he idolized to do ugly, mean and violent things every week for five years: guilty, nauseous and, though it filled him with self-loathing to acknowledge it, undoubtedly jealous of most of her clients.
"I'm not naïve, Christopher. I can imagine the sorts of things your Actives are asked to do. I'm a specialist in psychiatry, remember? I know all about the dark, repressed desires that people harbor in their souls, which could never be fulfilled by ordinary means. And I won't lie to you: the thought that your inmates here are being used as mindless instruments to satisfy those black desires does objectively appall me. But then I haven't been feeling very objective for a long time now. Let me show you something."
Clara undid the buttons on the cuffs of her dark gray chiffon blouse, carefully rolled up her sleeves and held out her arms, palms upward, for Topher's inspection. His eyes flickered questioningly up to her face for a moment, followed her gaze downward, then slammed shut reflexively: on each pale wrist there were three horizontal, bright red lines, so straight and perfectly parallel that they might have been drawn on with a fineliner and a ruler, except that the flesh around them was pink and swollen.
Feeling like a pathetic excuse for a doctor and a human being, Topher swallowed the bile that had risen in his throat and gingerly opened his eyes. To his relief, Clara was already re-buttoning her sleeves.
"Jesus, Doc – Clara, I – I don't know what to say. I'm so sorry. That's, like, the most…," Topher flailed around helplessly for the right word but Clara waved her hand from side to side for him to stop.
"Please don't. I'm so embarrassed about the whole thing. I haven't even let anyone see the cuts until today. What was I thinking, slitting my wrists like a stupid, self-indulgent teenager? I didn't mean it to work or anything; I fixed myself up about a minute after I did it. But… doing it for real, in a more efficient way, is something I haven't been able to stop thinking about recently and it scares me. Compared to that, being somebody else – anybody else at all – seems like the better option."
"OK, I can see that; I totally can, but listen, you still don't have to become an Active; I've got a better idea." Topher had got to his feet and was pacing agitatedly up and down the room. "I can just imprint you pro bono as anything you want, as many times as you want; all you have to do is give me the specs of the personality you'd most like and, hey presto, I can cook it up for you in a couple of hours. That way you get all the advantages of being a Doll without any of the icky drawbacks; a genius solution to the problem, if I say so myself!"
Clara reached out and grabbed Topher's hand as he passed and tugged him back down beside her.
"Now you listen to me for a moment please. I'm truly touched that you are so concerned about my wellbeing, but really, once my mind is wiped, what difference does it make what happens to my body? One way or another, it wouldn't be me in there anymore. And there is one major advantage I would forfeit were I to accept your offer rather than becoming an official employee of the Dollhouse: the obscenely large pay check."
This last observation was unexpected enough to temporarily distract Topher from basking in the fact that Clara had pulled his hand across onto her knee and was holding it tightly between both of hers. He must have given her a blatantly baffled look because she smiled and said, "I'm glad to see that I don't strike you as a mercenary person. Well, I'm not usually, I assure you, but think: if my experiment was successful and I proved that your technology was hugely effective for treating psychiatric disorders, in order to put it to that use I would need to set up and staff my own facility, which would obviously be pricey to say the least. However, I'm confident that the fees for five years of service here would more than cover the costs.
"In any case," Clara sighed, "I'm not even sure why I've allowed myself to be drawn into this argument. You always did like to argue, I know, but this time it's really pointless because it's too late; I've just been upstairs with Ms DeWitt signing my contract. I'll be starting work next week. Apparently, I'm to be known as Whiskey. Appropriate, I suppose, as this is a kind of technological equivalent of drinking myself into oblivion."
"Oh. Right. Huh… I gotta say though, I think a classy Italian drink would have suited you way better. Like, uh, Campari, or Sambuca, or how about Limoncello? I'll mention it to DeWitt next time I see her." Topher managed a weak little smile before he felt a prickling at the backs of his eyes and had to turn his head hurriedly as far away from Clara as his imprisoned hand would allow.
They sat in silence for a long moment. Finally, she said, "So, I suppose now you can guess the favor I came here to ask you."
"Err…" It hadn't actually occurred to Topher at all that Clara might have had a specific reason for coming to see him. He was such a retard sometimes. What did he think: that she'd come down to spend the afternoon in his office because she had a craving for a box of apple juice and a lecture on morality from a hypocrite?
Luckily, she continued without waiting for a reply. "I need your help, please, to monitor the progress of my experiment. Of course, I'm sure you monitor all your Actives' physical and mental conditions comprehensively anyway, but there are certain things in my brain I'd like you to keep an especially close eye on: the HPA axis, serotonin and norephinephrine levels, hippocampal volume; you know the kind of stuff; I'll give you a list… that is, if you don't mind doing it? I know it's extra work and you're probably run off your feet as it is, being the only trained neural programmer in the place."
"Oh, no, no, don't worry about it; I've got the workload totally under control. How else would I find the time to play with all my cool toys?" Topher grabbed an inflatable dinosaur from a shelf behind him and waved it in Clara's face. "Plus, the Rossum guys keep saying they're gonna get me another neuroscience grad to be my assistant, which I guess could be handy sometimes, even though I don't really need one. Anyway, it'll be great to help out with your experiment; like being back in your class at school… except that you won't be there, which kinda sucks."
"Thank you, Christopher, I appreciate it very much," Clara said. She gave his hand a final squeeze, then relinquished it and stood up. "After talking with you today I feel confident that you'll take good care of my mind."
"The best, Doc. You can count on it." He almost added: "It'll be safer with me than in your head" but decided, in a rare fit of tactfulness, that it was too close to the truth to be funny.
Still, Topher considered as he walked his guest to the elevator, wasn't that the one bright spot in this godawful situation? At least this way, Clara's mind wouldn't be able to do her body any more damage and they'd both be in a place wherehe could check on them every day and do his very best to keep them out of harm's way.
It was the first time Topher had ever felt emotionally invested in his work and he wondered whether it was a good thing.
More than three years later, after Whiskey had been thrown about as far into harm's way as possible, yet somehow escaped, broken but breathing, Topher was told to design her a long-term imprint.
He looked at the specifications that DeWitt had given him and wondered if she had noticed their irony as she wrote them: "We need a doctor who is kind and caring, yet also meticulous, efficient and highly intelligent. She must be passionately committed to her work and willing to argue vehemently for her beliefs, above all in matters relating to the physical wellbeing of the Actives."
Probably not. DeWitt hadn't known Dr Lavenza like he had.
As he'd be halfway there simply by following his instructions, how could Topher resist throwing in some more random odds and ends to make the imprint that little bit closer to the body's original owner? Computer skills, of course - he could never really respect anyone without those- ; taste in clothes – well, she used to look so hot, why would he mess with that? And then a few other little insignificant quirks that were all he'd been able to pick up during the paltry two hours a week he used to spend in her company: a tendency to write in pencil rather than ink; a liking for peach iced tea; a way of nodding her head for emphasis when she spoke. The finishing touch was the name he gave to his masterpiece, Claire: a homage which seemed so obvious that he was sure it was only a matter of time before DeWitt pulled him up on it.
Even as he typed in the code for the imprint, Topher knew that one day he would come to regret what he was doing. He knew that he was drifting dangerously close to breaking – or at least being tempted to break - the one and only rule inscribed in C. Brink's private Code of Professional Ethics: the programming of Actives for the purposes of any kind of ogley, touchy-feely and/or nakedy-type personal jollies acquisition is strictly and categorically forbidden. Even on your birthday.
This was, in fact, – in slightly different words - an official regulation for all Dollhouse staff, though it was common knowledge that, if conducted with extreme discretion and at no risk of loss of income or damage to House assets, DeWitt was prone to turn a blind eye to the occasional infringement. Topher, however, had invented his own rule long before he knew this: the moment, during his very first tour of the House, he had stepped out into the atrium and five or six drop-dead, stone-cold foxes – of the kind that would never have deigned to glance in his direction in college – had smiled sweetly at him and wished him good morning. Frankly, how anyone who saw those girls in that blank, smiling, passive state every single day could fail to be totally creeped out at the thought of getting up to hanky panky with them - no matter who or what they had temporarily become - was beyond his comprehension.
But Dr Claire Saunders would be different. She wouldn't revert back to sweet, innocent passivity after a couple of days. That was the point. She'd be there, working beside him, day in day out; tantalizingly similar to the most perfect woman he had ever met, yet constantly developing as a person in her own right to the point where even he, her creator, might eventually forget that she wasn't one; or, at least, not the one she appeared to be. It was very dangerous.
Of course, he didn't kid himself that there was the remotest chance she would have any romantic interest in him. She would be far too close to Dr Lavenza for that. He had equipped her with a worldview diametrically opposite to his own; a kind of safety net to guard against problems that he, with his profound moral deficiency, might be liable to miss or disregard. And he had made sure that Claire would not be afraid, when necessary, to unleash the kind of argumentative fervor, underpinned by deep personal conviction, that Clara Lavenza had almost always kept contained.
Yet even Topher, with his pitifully small experience in such matters, knew that impassioned arguments could sometimes backfire and lead to a different kind of passion. Back in his Caltech days, this consideration had played a significant, if subconscious, motivating role in his ongoing mission to try and provoke Dr Lavenza into a state of unrestrained fury, and it continued to fuel many a guilty late night fantasy involving her. But no such thing, Topher sternly told himself, must ever ever ever be allowed to happen between him and Claire Saunders. It would be of the same ilk of wrongness as hooking up with Dr L. herself but with about two extra servings of super-sized wrong, given that she was now an Active whom he had specifically committed himself to taking care of.
So, though it pained him to do it, Topher's final adjustments to the Saunders imprint were to give her a strong physical aversion to the scents of his soap, shampoo and aftershave and, in a last-minute flash of inspiration, the memory of a cheating scumbag of an ex-boyfriend who wore sweater-vests. It wasn't a hundred percent foolproof solution and it didn't a hundred percent banish Topher's sense of uneasiness about the whole situation, but at least, this way, he could go about his work safe in the knowledge that his one and only ethical principle remained intact.